Margaret Cho: Assassin Reviews
Typically I love Margaret Cho. I go see her when she's in town, I buy all of her DVDs, I have the posters. But this one was a big let down. It is seriously like watching some lame form of the news being broadcast. I laughed ONLY once and it was on her parody of Bjork because it was dead on. Please, please Margaret, go back to your REAL comedy and leave the boring news broadcasts to the folks in the suits at 10PM. There is little talk of her mother, little of her ordinary jokes and references and few attempts at anything funny at all. I highly recommend her first two DVDs, but beg of you to skip this one for your own sanity.
I think she's great, but this one wasn't the funniest. Still good, but not "ROTFL" (as the kids say). Die-hards will adore it, of course, but for the casual fan, it didn't blow me away.
This is my least favorite Cho stand-up to date. For one, her monologue used to rely on yelling at the Hollywood mucky mucks for trying to make her conform to an unattainable aesthetic standard. Now that she's actually skinny, those humorous vignettes have been excised from her repertoire. It's too bad, because some of that material is hilarious. Also, she spends too much time railing against the Bush administration. These jokes are way too easy, and therefore not as funny as her usual stuff. Lastly, she's using a different on-stage voice now, like she's channeling a black cross-dresser when she speaks. What's up with that? Still, she can be irreverent and raunchy when the time calls for it, and that material still makes me laugh.
I don?t find Margaret Cho funny. She doesn?t make me laugh or giggle or even smile or smirk, but she?s interesting to listen to because she is opinionated on social events and public figures. I know most comedians comment on this stuff, but there?s something different about her. She?s smarter or something, more informed. Other comedians make fun of public figures for obvious reasons?she has a different spin on it. Or something.
A lot of what she said was commentary, not even jokes. "Where there's gay men, there's bitchiness *crowd cheers*" She makes some great funny faces but overall more boring than humorous.
Assassin is mean spirited, opinionated and gloriously upfront. Cho's agenda is liberalism so it is no surprise that she has me on her side. What is surprising - as is mostly the case with socio-political comics - is that most of the time the best bits are not the funny ones but the hard truths and accusatory accounts of what is so wrong with our present day world and its leaders. The humour is secondary but even then when funny it is gut wrenchingly so.
Her first two films are phenomenal, but I was left feeling a bit impotent by Revolution so when I watched this I was pleasantly surprised to find her back in form.